News

Incinerator's need for outside waste has city fuming

Frank D. RoylanceTHE BALTIMORE SUN

From the outside, the only clues to what goes on inside the Medical Waste Associates incinerator on Hawkins Point Road in Baltimore are small red signs on the chain-link perimeter fence warning of a "biohazard."

No sign identifies the plant, there is no visible smoke and the trucks that bring in hospital waste are closed, unmarked tractor-trailers.

Inside, the only noticeable smell is that of the plastic bags, in which most of the hospital waste arrives, and in which it remains until it is pushed into the 1,400-degree fire chamber.

The $26 million Hawkins Point incinerator is nevertheless the source of a political and legal stink that threatens five years of work by the city and area hospitals to clean up a troublesome system of medical waste disposal.

And that worries the 21 area hospitals that use the incinerator. "The facility may go out of business," said Frank Monius, director of planning for the Maryland Hospital Association. "The city may say that's tough luck for the facility, but we're the ones holding the bag, literally. We will have no place to take our waste."

The incinerator was supposed to close small hospital incinerators in city neighborhoods and get hospital waste out of municipal landfills.

Instead, neighborhood groups, who always opposed it, and Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, a former advocate, are suing to close the 17-month-old Hawkins Point incinerator for violating a 1989 city ordinance banning medical wastes originating outside the city, Baltimore, Harford or Anne Arundel counties.

MWA officials say they can neither complete their testing, nor make a profit afterward, without the outside waste. So they're suing the city in federal court, claiming that the ordinance is an unconstitutional restraint on interstate trade.

The constitutionality issue is scheduled to be decided in the U.S. Court of Appeals in April. The city's suits are to be heard in Baltimore Circuit Court in July.

In the City Council, meanwhile, Martin E. "Mike" Curran, D-3rd, and Agnes B. Welch, D-4th, have filed legislation to allow the MWA incinerator to expand its catchment area to all of Maryland and the District of Columbia. "It's a clean facility," Mr. Curran said. "It is an environmentally sound bill."

They are opposed by 6th District council members and others who side with community groups opposed to the plant. Gloria Sipes, president of the Community of Curtis Bay Association, called the Curran bill "ludicrous. . . . How could people in good conscience introduce a bill for a company that so flagrantly violated what they agreed to before?"

The mess began in 1987, a time of heightened worry about illegal medical waste disposal. Syringes were washing up on Atlantic and Chesapeake beaches, and hospitals in the Baltimore region joined to fix what had become a troublesome medical waste disposal system.

By law, hospital waste has to be segregated. Infectious "red-bag" waste -- syringes, body parts and other contaminated material -- has to be burned in specially licensed incinerators. The rest, called "clear-bag" waste, from office paper to cafeteria debris, can be hauled to municipal incinerators and landfills.

Hospitals dislike the sorting because it requires more handling and exposes hospitals to lawsuits for injuries or infections. Many hospitals with their own incinerators can combine the waste, but they face tightening air pollution standards.

And in the Baltimore area, waste segregation simply wasn't working.

"As much as the hospitals tried, there was always something infectious or bloody that ended up in the general waste stream," Mr. Monius said. It became a hazard to municipal incinerator workers and a potential legal liability.

So in 1987, the city "threw the hospitals out," Mr. Monius said. The city let the hospitals' general waste into the city landfill temporarily, but hired a contractor to find and remove stray infectious material before the rest could be buried.

Medical Waste Associates offered a way out and an end to the costs and hazards of segregating waste. It promised to collect everything in lidded plastic carts wheeled right onto the hospital floors.

The carts would be hauled away daily by MWA trucks. At the incinerator, they would be dumped and cleaned automatically, the contents unopened and untouched by humans. The waste would burn for six hours at 1,400 degrees in a furnace with modern emissions controls.

City officials accepted MWA's proposal, but to calm opponents who feared Hawkins Point would become an interstate magnet for medical waste, passed the ordinance restricting the company to customers in the city and three neighboring counties.

The compromise worked, almost. The plant was built and began accepting waste in November 1990. It won a state operating permit in May 1991 and state environmental officials say it has operated well within all state and federal air pollution standards.

Twenty-one of 33 area hospitals, including Johns Hopkins and University hospitals, send waste to Hawkins Point. MWA says "10 to 12" small hospital incinerators were closed.

But MWA officials infuriated residents and alienated the Schmoke administration last year by accepting waste from outside the catchment area. Company Chairman William Boucher 3rd says he can't complete operating tests or run the plant profitably without it. Instead of the 85 tons a day MWA expected from local hospitals, he said, only about 50 tons are coming in. Six hospitals backed out after signing letters of intent.

At least eight hospitals continue to upgrade and run their own incinerators, with state and local approval. They calculate they would spend more and yield control of their costs by signing MWA's 20-year contract, which starts at $300 a ton, with escalators tied to the consumer price index. As a result, "we just barely had enough contracts signed to finance the plant," said Thomas D. McKewen, MWA vice president for technology.

It was definitely too little hospital waste to generate a profit. But Mr. Boucher said company officials believed they could still make the plant profitable by bringing in another 25 to 30 tons a day in infectious "boxed waste" from nursing homes, doctors' offices and clinics within the catchment area.

So they went ahead, financing and building a plant capable of burning 85 tons a day in either of two identical incineration units. The duplication allows the plant to continue processing waste in one unit, during breakdowns or scheduled maintenance on the other.

But the company badly miscalculated the boxed waste it would find locally. Mr. McKewen said only 2 to 5 tons daily has materialized, not 25.

MWA operators were faced with two problems: in the short term, where to find enough medical waste to complete plant testing needed to satisfy bond-holders; and in the long term, how to make a profit.

To meet obligations to bond-holders, Mr. Boucher said, MWA must show that the plant can burn 85 tons a day for 14 days, and that each unit can handle 85 tons a day for two days.

So the plant began accepting medical waste from outside the local "catchment" area. That waste stream has grown to 20 to 35 tons a day, most of it from New York and New Jersey.

But the testing has still not been done. Mr. Boucher said it has been difficult to get enough waste to do the testing because potential customers fear being cut off if the suits force the plant to close. "But we hope to complete it by the middle of May," he said.

Neighborhood groups learned of the outside waste last year and blew the whistle. The Schmoke administration responded by refusing to issue MWA a city occupancy permit and sued to close the incinerator. The plant has continued to run under state permits while the lawyers clash in court.

"Maybe we were naive," Mr. Boucher said, ". . . but we were told both by our lawyers and their [the city's] policies, that the catchment area applied only when we were in operation. And we're not in operation until we have all our permits and testing performed."

City officials were aware of MWA's need to import waste during performance testing, said Ronald R. Peterson, president of the Francis Scott Key Medical Center, who participated in the talks that led to the incinerator's construction. "That certainly was the understanding that Medical Waste Associates had with representatives of the city administration," but the understanding was intentionally never put in writing, or made public, he said.

"There was never an intent to mislead," he said. But "there was always the concern of not wanting to unnecessarily cause concern among folks that . . . did not want to see the facility serve a broader region."

Mayoral spokesman Clinton R. Coleman was unable to say what Mr. Schmoke understood about the need to import waste for performance tests. But when it began, he said, the mayor concluded that MWA had always intended to "expand their reach on an ongoing basis. . . . He felt they were not being above board and misled him, the council and the citizens of Baltimore."

Whatever their original intent, MWA officials say today that Baltimore and the three counties in the catchment area just don't generate enough medical waste to make the Hawkins Point plant profitable.

Mr. Boucher believes that holdout hospitals will eventually sign up with MWA, providing more waste and revenue, but the company can't wait that long. The company's survival requires it go "outside the catchment area," he said, adding that it's in everyone's best interest to allow it. "There are some 60 hospitals around the state running incinerators. "If we have a place to put [their waste], it's good for the state, good for us, and good for the environment."

But before Mayor Schmoke would allow the incinerator operation to expand, Mr. Coleman said, "he would shut it down."

Hospital waste incineration

Hospitals that send waste to the MWA incinerator:

Children's Hospital and Center for Reconstructive Surgery, Baltimore

Church Hospital, Baltimore

Deaton Hospital and Medical Center, Baltimore

Veteran's Administration Hospital, Loch Raven Boulevard, Baltimore.

Veteran's Administration Hospital, Fort Howard

Good Samaritan Hospital of Maryland, Baltimore

Harbor Hospital Center, Baltimore

Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore

Kennedy Krieger Institute for Handicapped Children, Baltimore